I can’t remember the actual arrival of The Haiku Handbook in my life—it seems to have been with me forever. Authored by William J. Higginson, he writes on the back cover, “Haiku happen all the time, wherever there are people who are ‘in touch’ with the world of their senses, and with their own feeling response to it.”*
About 1998, I wrote my first haiku—that to my surprise was published in a small haiku journal. I felt happy and was encouraged to write more. Since then, I have periodically experienced times of haiku awareness, as I did this past August. Over two days, I re-read Higginson’s book and wrote the haiku for this blog. Whatever I was doing I interrupted, scribbling images on scrap paper. Later I rewrote the words more sparingly, and if needed, rearranged their order and the lines until they conveyed my earlier experience.
Dim morning sky
Hearing a crow
I wave
Overripe papaya
Seeds
Resist
Raising my camera
The bird
A W A Y
In his book, Higginson develops his description of the haiku form, calling it “a vehicle for sharing experience, rather than as a vessel for thoughts about nature.”** My subject matter choices followed his expansiveness.
Yoga mat lost
Sitting up
On it
Morning rush
Old car door
SLAM!
Daybreak
Your side of the sheet
Unwrinkled
Dropping the flashlight
My feet
Shuffling
Canadian haiku poet and physician George Swede writes, “Haiku . . . avoids the use of metaphor, simile, and other poetic devices, obtaining its effects primarily through the juxtaposition of sensory impressions. If done successfully, this juxtaposition creates a moment of acute awareness about the external world. The person wrapped up in himself [or herself] is forced outward to a consideration of the unit of nature.***
New moon
LOUD frogs
Forecast
Clothes on barbed wire
Cows
graze
Monsoon heat
Two goats on the road
Detour
My realization is, “Haiku offer the opposite to complexity; each one invites us to think about a single image or several.”
* William J. Higginson with Penny Harter, Back Cover, The Haiku Handbook (New York: Kodansha
International Inc., 1989).
** Ibid., 113.
*** Ibid., 251.